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By: FEDweek StaffThe FAA has announced a pilot program of phased retirement, opening an application window for the month of August for 30 available offers agency-wide.
In phased retirement, at management’s discretion employees who are retirement-eligible–under one of the combinations requiring at least 20 years of service–may change to half-time work while receiving half of the retirement benefit they have accumulated to that point. Until retiring fully, they are treated as active employees for other purposes and are expected to spend a fifth of their working time mentoring other employees; on full retirement their benefits are recalculated to take the part-time work into account.
“The FAA pilot will be limited to an initial period of one year. Each participating employee will have an opportunity to elect the length of his/her phased retirement employment period within this period (e.g., three months, four months, one year),” an announcement to employees said, adding that the pilot “is limited to mission-critical and hard-to-fill positions” and that not all organizations within a line of business will have positions available.
Phased retirement has been authorized by law since 2014 but is little-used in practice. As of last fall, there were fewer than 300 phased retirees government-wide and about another 100 had completed a phased retirement period and had fully retired afterward.
The FAA has about 45,500 employees, of whom about 8,600 are retirement-eligible.
